rain

When April bends above me
And finds me fast asleep
Dust need not keep the secret
A live heart died to keep.

When April tells the thrushes,
The meadow-larks will know,
And pipe the three words lightly
To all the winds that blow.

Above his roof the swallows,
In notes like far-blown rain,
Will tell the little sparrow
Beside his window-pane.

O sparrow, little sparrow,
When I am fast asleep,
Then tell my love the secret
That I have died to keep.

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me -- who knows how? --
To thy chamber-window, sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream, --
The champak odors fall
Like sweet thoughts in a dream,
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O, beloved as thou art!

His heart to me, was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers;
I saw it then as we see things in dreams,--I do not remember how long I slept;
I remember the tress, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always on the
towers;
The walls are standing to-day, and the gates; I have been through the gates, I have
groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness is over
them;
His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.'

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy

The promises of the covenant of grace.

Isa. 55:1,2; Zech. 13:1; Mic. 7:19; Ezek. 36:25, etc.

In vain we lavish out our lives
To gather empty wind;
The choicest blessings earth can yield
Will starve a hungry mind.

Come, and the Lord shall feed our souls
With more substantial meat,
With such as saints in glory love,
With such as angels eat.

Our God will every want supply,
And fill our hearts with peace;
He gives by cov'nant and by oath
The riches of his grace.

Baptism.

Matt. 28:19; Acts 2:38.

'Twas the commission of our Lord,
"Go teach the nations, and baptize:"
The nations have received the word
Since he ascended to the skies.

He sits upon th' eternal hills,
With grace and pardon in his hands;
And sends his cov'nant with the seals,
To bless the distant British lands.

"Repent, and be baptized," he saith,
For the remission of your sins:"
And thus our sense assists our faith,
And shows us what his gospel means.

The different success of the gospel.

1 Cor. 1:23,24; 3:6,7; 2 Cor. 2:16.

Christ and his cross is all our theme;
The myst'ries that we speak
Are scandal in the Jew's esteem,
And folly to the Greek.

But souls enlightened from above
With joy receive the word;
They see what wisdom, power, and love
Shine in their dying Lord.

The vital savor of his name
Restores their fainting breath;
But unbelief perverts the same
To guilt, despair, and death.

Till God diffuse his graces down,

The stream is shrunk--the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
With fevered jowl and dusty flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And, by one drouthy fear made still,
Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
Now 'neath his dam the fawn may see,
The lean Pack-Wolf as cowed as he,
And the tall buck, unflinching, note
The fangs that tore his father's throat.
The pools are shrunk--the streams are dry,
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud--Good Hunting!--Loose